Take a Walk on the Wild Side

Abstract

"The Paradise Club" was on the east end of town, risky, lit only by garish neon signs and the full moon which skipped uncertainly across the sky: a prop raised up on ropes and pulleys. Nestled on a cozy, little side street between "Shahrazad's Massage Parlour" and a "Down to Earth" health food store, it resembled an abandoned greenhouse grown wild. In reality PC's was a tin-plated, renovated warehouse with its façade painted in varying shades of green. The moon's cool light mixed in sweeping swaths with stray patches of hot pink, radioactive green, and azure neon. It set a hell of a stage. Beyond two great, hand-carved, ebony doors, "The Paradise Club" became a progressive walk into another world, a netherworld. Aside from the typical odors of stale cigarettes, the smoke machine, sweaty dancers and pungent alcoholic concoctions, a certain quality to the air inside belied its seeming likeness to any other rainbow-strobed, mirror-surfaced dive. It was a place known only by word of mouth, where strangers gathered with the familiarity of long lost friends.